


Equinox

by yeoltidecarol



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Barista Kim Minseok | Xiumin, F/M, Fluff, Romance, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-11 22:54:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16861597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeoltidecarol/pseuds/yeoltidecarol
Summary: It’s winter when you stumble into Minseok’s coffee shop, winter when he’s cold, unfeeling, and disheartened with the seasons. Little does he know, you are the winds of change.





	Equinox

**WINTER**

The day he met you was the day she left.

He was awake when it happened, the slow gathering of her things into one small duffel and the calm, empty declaration that she would come back later for the rest. The motivation to move eluded him, his muscles opposed to following her, reaching for her, calling out to her in a reckless sort of indignation. It wasn’t that he was angry, wasn’t that he was caught in despair, rather that he couldn’t find it in him to care. Not really, not after everything had been said and felt into ash.

She did not take his heart with her. No, he’d retrieved that long ago somewhere in the changing of the seasons. What she took instead was his empathy, his willingness to give love freely. With her, it had died, withered over the course of many years until all he had was an apathetic sort of affection, the kind he said with words he didn’t mean.

Long after she was gone, when the grey light of the morning spilled through the curtains of his window, he sat upright on his bed and regarded the way the room remained unchanged. As if she had gone on vacation. As if she had gone to visit family. As if she would return. He glanced sidelong at his disenchanted life with a scowl, waiting for colour to return to the walls, the room, his heart, his life. Winter was like that, he supposed, a succubus both of good intentions and the gold of the sun.

A cold rain had spilled over the city, frigid in its intent to cleanse the street, his shop, his memory, perhaps even his heart. The storm looked as he felt, bitter in its deluge and bleak in its sentiments. People bustled in and out, grim and scowling, shaking the rain from their hair and hats, gloved hands clutching warm drinks and placing tips in the jar as thanks. The world was moving and turning, but his world was stopping.

You pushed through the door with a laugh, even though you were alone. Melodic and gleeful, you stumbled through with a light that made him feel as though he was eclipsing the sun. It wasn’t that you blinded him, it was simply that you warmed him, touched something inside him that felt dusty and untouched with your smile. It wasn’t that you blinded him, it was simply that you moved him, however insignificant it had been at the start.

When you ordered your coffee, you told him a lot of things: you told him you were lucky to have found his shop, you told him you were new to the city, you told him you weren’t used to rain in winter. You told him a lot of things but he told you nothing, simply nodded and watched the way you eyed the croissants with a passionate sort of stare. He gave you one for free, though, even now, he is unsure why.

What he remembers most clearly, though, was your yellow hat. Truthfully, it told him more about you than any of the words you had given him. It told him that you rejected black as a winter shade, defying all the rules of the season as though they didn’t pertain to you. It told him that you would stand out in a crowd, easy for him to find and easy for him to see, yet, somehow, you had found him first. It told him that luck came in many shapes and sizes, and on that day, it came in the form of a smile.

On you, he decided, winter didn’t look right. It tried to move around you, bend you, and change you, but you were steadfast in your refusal to succumb to the gloom. On you, winter didn’t look right, and so gave you a star in the foam of your coffee instead of the seasonal snowflake. And the look you gave him when you saw it, the way your mouth pulled into a wide, cheshire cat grin, kept his insides warm well past the melting of the last flake on the earth.

**SPRING**

The trees were restless in their anticipation of and desire to bloom, similar to the way he had grown restless in his anticipation of seeing you. It took him a week to ask for your name, three realize that yellow hat was a staple of your wardrobe, and only two days for the hope you would become a regular customer to blossom in his chest like a sunflower.

The playfulness in his tone was half serious, perhaps mostly serious, when he asked if you kept coming back to see him. The playfulness in yours was absent when you said you did. That was his Valentine’s gift, two words and a fistful of implication. He clung to it past the Ides of March, too nervous to test the waters again, but when you came through the shop at the start of April, tights and a skirt and the freedom of your skin beneath the spring sun, he stopped thinking of you has a lucky star and more as a beacon.

You never ordered the same thing twice, spent weeks working your way through the menu, and he spent lonely nights coming up with new blends and flavors just for you. He said you were off the menu, and you said it was an odd nickname but you liked it, took ownership of it the way one takes ownership of their dreams. There was no way you could know truly unexpected you were, unpredictable and unplanned, and wholly surprising. There was no way you could know that your ease into the name turned you from someone special into someone remarkable.

He thought you were brave, then, in all the ways he wasn’t. Wild, free, alive.

You never ordered the same thing twice and every week, tucked tightly beneath your arm was a different book. One week was Hemmingway and another was Danielewski, your mind moving between eras and genres as if time was your plaything. Most would be impressed, many would be surprised, but he expected it of you. The laws of the universe were blown apart by you, your uninhibited originality turning them to dust at your feet.

You never ordered the same thing twice and every week had a different book beneath your arm, so when he questioned what your favourite was, for both the book and the coffee, he thought for sure you’d have an answer or an opinion. You did, but your even diplomacy, kind eyes and your soft tongue, made his heart stutter in its rhythm.

_How could I choose, you asked, when every work of art is perfect?_

With a laugh, he told you to remain subjective, and you said you were, that it was unfair to judge a thing that bent to subjective will. For hours - hours alone and hours in bed - he thought about that, thought about you and what it meant to be perfect, subjective, and inspiring. Days later, he would work up the courage to ask if you thought he was perfect based on your prior argument.

You said he was.

Days after that, he asked if you thought you were perfect. You bit your lip for a long while in thought, remaining humble while also too wise for your young years. Finally, you said, someone must think so. There was a knowing look to your gaze, a fire deep within your irises that emboldened him.

Instead of your name on the cup, he wrote his number.

Instead of a flower in the foam, he made a heart.

**SUMMER**

Hand holding in the heat of July always made him uncomfortable, made his skin sweat and slick with too many things that were beyond his control. Always, he would pull away with a shake of his fingers, wiping away the sweat, the person, the sensation of being swollen with purpose from his joints. Always, he would say, I know you are mine and affection can wait until we are not damp with the fever. He would never clarify which heat he meant, the weather or his wanting. He never wanted his partner to feel let down. 

With you, it was different. It isn’t that he expected it to be, or even wanted it to be - he had grown into notions of romance, unchanged and unmoved in his age based on the ideas of what he liked, what he wanted, and what he had experienced. The same way you broke the laws of the universe, you broke all the laws he had set for himself.

On your first date, he wanted to kiss you, and you let him. You surrendered to it first with your heart, and then with your mouth, and he swallowed all of it whole.

On the first day of the summer heatwave, he had reached for your hand and shivered the feel of your wet skin. It brought him back to the day you first met, your hand cooling him and pouring over him like a storm.

In the sweltering humidity of July, he layed with you on a blanket and told you he loved you, loved all the parts of you he knew and had yet to discover. The secret parts, he said, were the most exciting and the most beautiful.

In the sweltering humidity of July, you told him you loved him too.

That night, his air conditioner broke. It rumbled to a halt and let the evening sun pour into the bedroom, turning the walls into a greenhouse that blossomed with orange, red, and devotion. He thought of it that way, as he made love to you, sweating into the sheets as he held your hand, tasted your skin, licked the perspiration from your brow. He thought of it that way, as he moved within you and let you move within him, filling all the empty parts of him that had been temporarily sealed until he could feel again. Until he could feel you.

Hand holding in the heat of July made him uncomfortable, but with you, he didn’t think there was ever a time when he’d get enough of your skin. It wasn’t that he wanted to hold your hand, he wanted to hold all of you, completely, with all of him until there was no way to tell where he ended and you began.

Some time in May you stopped ordering hot coffee, switching instead to iced drinks, drinks in which he couldn’t leave images in the foam.

Not that it mattered. He’d started leaving marks of his love on your skin well before the season, and those were far less transient.

**AUTUMN**

Autumn was unprecedented, simply because you were in it. True, it was always his favourite and always took him by surprise, how brilliant the world became, but watching you move through the death of the world made him start to believe in magic. He’d spent seasons with you thinking this was it, that there was no way he could love you any more than he already did. That there was no way you could look better in a season than the one that came before it. But always, you did.

Always, you did.

Two weeks into October, he decided that Autumn looked best on you, your hair, your skin, your lips. Still, the yellow had remained but it made all the world around you gold. Brown didn’t exist in this new world, instead you turned it burgundy, plum, and bronze. For him you made the world into all the best shades, made apples more crimson, made the night more purple than black. That was the trick, he thought, your magic was the slow making and taking of the world, the giving of life and the taking away to leave behind something more profound, something more desirable in its wake.

Cinnamon was how he came to describe the season, the smell of it in the air as you baked and the taste of it on your skin as he kissed you, hungry for the light that splayed across your shoulders, your back, your neck. Cinnamon was what he started to call you, changing your name each season to match your whim. It lingered in his bones, even when the cold wind threatened to steal it from his tongue. It lingered in his heart, even when the days grew shorter and the frost grew stronger.

He started brewing his coffee with cinnamon, feasting on you even when you weren’t there, gone from him to move throughout your day, until he could have you at night. As a consequence, the shop smelled like you, long into the day, until the first customers of the evening rush arrived. Drunk on the memory you, he would serve and laugh easier, smile brighter, feel more like the man he left behind in winter.

Always, you would come to him before the end of his shift, making you the last coffee he would serve.

Always, you would order something different, something to keep him on his toes.

Always he made you a snowflake in the foam, his way of letting you know he was ready. Ready to see what you could make of destruction. Ready to see how you would make a rainbow of the white.

Always, you were the changing tide of the seasons of his heart.


End file.
